


Cardinal

by Paraxdisepink



Category: Smallville
Genre: M/M, Power Dynamics, Red Kryptonite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-20
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-12-05 21:30:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/728128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paraxdisepink/pseuds/Paraxdisepink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Lex has found out Davis’ secret and Davis is forced to depend on him in order to keep Doomsday at bay. Lex is damaged though from all that Clark and others in his life have done to him and Doomsday is basically the One Rine for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cardinal

It wasn’t him, the twenty year-old Romanee Conti or the cut crystal goblet Lex had poured it into, but Davis Bloome drank anyway. He’d grown up on the streets alone, thanks to his father, and was too tired of having nothing to refuse whatever generosity came his way. Maybe that was the reason he stayed here. Who else would help him? It was the reason they’d all stayed – Clark, Helen, Lana. Lex Luthor bought his friends with his _generosity_ and they betrayed him in the end.

Lex took a seat beside Davis on the leather sofa before the fire. He wasn’t being generous this time. Far from it, he’d learned his lesson about buying friends a long time ago and the quiet figure beside him presented him with a once in a lifetime opportunity, one that went beyond the Black Ship from the second meteor shower and the mysterious purple orb his father had hidden in Zurich combined. He’d seen what Davis Bloome could do . . . bodies ripped apart, buckets worth of blood . . . and the fascinating thing about it was that the monster inside was as alien to Davis’ nature as he had been to this world the day Lionel Luthor had brought him to the mansion in a cage. He asked an age-old question, one Lex had asked himself all his life. Could a man escape his destiny? Did holding onto his humanity matter? 

His design was ingenious. Looking at him, you’d never guess he’d been sent to wipe the earth clean of its human rubble and clear a path for an alien conquest. Lex wouldn’t have pinned the string of gruesome murders around the city on him had he not found him lying naked in the street last week, bone spikes not yet vanished into his skin. His true origins had shocked Davis himself more than anyone. He worked long hours on the streets saving lives. He went to Mass. He wanted a family. He spoke of the meteor infected as human beings. Most of all, he had no memory of the murders. It might as well have been someone else tearing the bodies to pieces and leaving him at the crime scene. Lex remembered his own experiment with the black meteor rock that had left him bound in the basement while the darker him ran rampant. He remembered refusing to believe that other part was him. Killing machine or man, no one wanted to accept their own demons. 

And true to the guise of perfect humanity, Davis didn’t possess Clark’s mythical physical perfection. The soft lines of Clark’s face spoke of his youth and impractical black and white naiveté. Davis’ features were harsher, sharp at some angles, but in his own rougher way, he was just as striking. He’d accepted the grey, growing up in the real world, shied away from the black and reached for the white with everything in him. His only naiveté lay in the rosary he carried and his belief that someone could save him. Left to his own devices, he’d won out over Destiny – for the most part. All in all, it was hard not to admire him, in more ways than one. Lex watched him bring the wine glass to his lips. They were red and full, redder than Clark’s his skin was so pale, and Lex let his gaze settle there. He might have abandoned the idea of buying love with generosity this time, but he wasn’t above garnering small privileges out of their little deal, and if those privileges came with a cost for his newest object of interest, Davis had too much on his plate to notice. That made it easier – sometimes – and so Lex let himself admire the curve of Davis’ mouth and the angles of his features and the strength of the square hand curled around his wine glass. If you were going to make a deal, Lex’s father had often cautioned him, especially one with the Devil, make sure you get something out of it. 

If Lex’s gaze or the sentiments behind it discomfited him, he felt too indebted to say so. He was strikingly human in that regard. His mannerisms were astoundingly human. He wasn’t small, but at the moment he looked it, slouched in on himself with his arms folded across his chest. If Lex didn’t know better he’d think he was cold, but there were no goose bumps on the skin exposed by the short sleeves of his uniform shirt, just smooth muscle. Lex wasn’t convinced he could feel cold. 

“A million dollars for your thoughts,” Lex broke the silence when he saw that Davis apparently had no intention of acknowledging him. He’d made that joke to Lana once without much success – he couldn’t help himself – but oddly enough this time one corner of Davis’ mouth curved up in an unconscious smile. Unlike Clark, the other Kryptonian had a sense of humor.

Davis sighed, realizing he hadn’t said more than a few words since he’d come in from work, too busy draining his wine glass one slow sip at a time and staring into the fire as though it could show him his future. It couldn’t. Lex had tried.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. He rarely raised his voice. “I keep waiting for the blue meteor rock to stop working.”

Lex nodded. He’d made it a goal to test the effects of all the meteor rocks on his impressive subject. He’d seen the effect of the green the day he’d met him. It was the same effect he’d seen with Clark a dozen times – nausea, weakness, the veins standing out on his arms, pain . . . . Blue was the only other color he’d had in the lab, and despite the challenge of getting it under skin that could not be penetrated it had seemed to keep him human.

“There’s no guarantee it’ll stop working,” Lex told him. The blue meteor rock was only a temporary solution, a safety mechanism for a weapon Lex intended to learn how to aim, but he hadn’t let Davis in on that little secret yet. 

“Everything else did,” Daivs said, looking at the floor. “Whatever I’d try, I’d build up a tolerance in about three days.”

Lex shook his head. Davis had set himself up for failure, relying on human medicine to cure him – anti-psychotic drugs, sedatives. He wasn’t unintelligent, but as a medical person he had looked to solve his “problem” through medical means, and top of that Lex suspected there was a part of him that had believed the transformations and the murders were nothing more than hallucinations. Schizophrenia was easier to accept that the truth. Anything was. 

He laid a hand on Davis’ back, feeling the muscles tighten through the pale blue of his cotton shirt. This was the part where he soothed him, where Davis just sat there and let him. “We’ll find a way. If there’s one thing my father taught me its that a Luthor doesn’t accept the word ‘impossible.’” 

It shouldn’t be impossible. His goal was to control what Davis could do, not cure it. The things he could accomplish with the power that Davis had . . . He could save mankind from more Black Ships and Dark Thursdays. He could stand against Clark. He’d always believed Sageth the true hero of the story.

Davis turned to him with those same lost dark eyes that had asked if he was Warrior Angel as a child. He wasn’t naïve, but he made the mistake of taking Lex’s determination for caring, because that was what he wanted. “I don’t know where I’d be without you,” he said.

Lex smiled and rubbed a hand down his back. Maybe in time the real question they’d ask was where would the world would be without him? It really was a tragedy, a father’s iron will tearing apart a man who wanted to do good in a world that had been cruel to him, a man who managed to treat others with warmth and compassion despite the fact that his life had given him little reason to do so, despite the force inside him that urged him to tear apart anything that threatened him. It was _their_ tragedy, though Lex was done feeling sorry for himself. He’d seen first hand what Zod could do and he would stop at nothing to keep his kind from harming his fellow man again. Fortunately Davis wanted the same thing badly enough to let himself be used in the process. But he wanted something else too. He wanted the thing Lex had stopped needing the day Clark and his father had chosen each other instead of him. Lex pitied him for it. 

“I know what it’s like to struggle against the darkness inside,” he said as softly as he could manage, watching Davis’ eyes above the rim of the glass he’d brought to his lips for another sip, a long sip. Davis might not be much of a connoisseur, but even he had to admit the wine was exquisite, a rare vintage in itself and rarer still with the red meteor rock giving it its almost incandescent ruby color. Lesser men would declare it too valuable to drink, but what was the point of inheriting a fortune if the word “priceless” imposed limits? Besides, his father owed him this.

Davis’ eyelids fluttered, as though something had put the world out of focus and when he spoke his voice wasn’t as low as before. “Think so?” He looked Lex in the eye. “You have –“

Lex cut him off, leaning in and abruptly capturing his mouth. They’d had this discussion before. Davis argued that at least he had a choice in what he became. But he underestimated human nature. Lionel Luthor’s teachings were as insurmountable as anything in Davis’ DNA. 

The kiss caught Davis off guard. His wine glass clinked against the watch at his wrist, and the hand he raised to Lex’s jaw was wet with the drops he’d spilt, bright red liquid beading on impenetrable white skin. That shocked Lex in turn, not the priceless vintage dripping onto the supple leather of his Italian couch, but the fact that Davis had reached for him at all. 

Lex pulled back enough to meet his eyes in a mixture of confusion and intrigue. It wasn’t the response he was accustomed to. He wasn’t accustomed to much of a reponse at all beyond Davis sitting or lying still and letting him do what he wanted, his mouth soft but unresponsive, as though the question of whether he objected to Lex’s advances or not hadn’t entered his mind. For him, they came with the terrority, his small sacrifice for the salvation Lex offered. He’d make any sacrifice to stop the monster inside him – his life, the soul he often doubted he had, someone else’s - and maybe in that way the two of them weren’t alike at all, but complete opposites. Lex had had his chance to make that one sacrifice and reach for his own salvation, but he’d turned away from it and chosen power instead. Nothing he’d been through since had made him regret that choice.

“What’s the matter?” Davis was impatient all of a sudden. Lex blinked. He wa so quiet and sparse with his responses most of the time it was easy to forget he wasn’t as passive as one might think. He hadn’t survived on the street being passive, and Lex couldn’t say he didn’t like the reminder. “This is what you want.”

It was, and a little enthusiasm made everything better. But the question was what Davis wanted. This arrangement of theirs wouldn’t work if they didn’t want the same things . . . power, each other. As it stood, they didn’t want the same thing at all. Davis had the power of pure destruction inside him and he wanted to get rid of it. But maybe that was because he’d never learned what power could do for him.

Maybe he was beginning to get curious. After all, he had Lex Luthor beside him and even without his transformative abilities he was bigger and stronger. He could take what he wanted. The dark eyes that searched Lex’s face seemed to read the thought. The hand at Lex’s jaw pulled him closer and before he knew it that full mouth that he had stared at so many times pressed down on his and for the first time it was happening. Davis was actively kissing him, not simply allowing it to happen by virtue of not saying “stop.” It wasn’t Lana’s distant kiss, but a thing of real hunger. Lex’s heart sped up against his ribs. It had been a long time since anyone had kissed him with real passion. It was certainly the first time he’d been kissed by a visitor from another planet, and that was more than his father and his Veritas cabal could claim.

Davis gave him a moment to catch his breath, and seemed to enjoy the way Lex stared up at him star-eyed. A Luthor didn’t show when something put him off balance, but given the circumstances Lex thought even his father would forgive him. 

“If I’d have known this was your response to a good Merlot I’d have gotten you drunk days ago,” Lex tried to quip. It wasn’t easy, considering how dry his throat was. He ran his tongue over his lips despite himself, the phantom pressure of Davis’ mouth still there, tingling. Most of his nerve endings tingled too, he realized. He’d fantasized about kissing Clark thousands of times, but he’d come to believe that Clark was too cold for real desire. Clark, Helen, Lana – they weren’t human enough. 

Davis smiled, not a real smile, just a brief twitch of his mouth that gave the barest flash of a dimple – an odd characteristic for someone designed to destroy. Color had rushed into his face, though not from embarrassment – he didn’t have Clark’s inhibitions. “I doubt this stuff would work on me,” Davis shook his head, not out of despair, but a simple fact desputed. “It’s you. I feel like you understand me. No one else has.” The words had something of a pout to them. He narrowed his eyes and added, “fuck them.”

Lex blinked. Davis Bloome didn’t have a habit of swearing. He worked as hard to hide the traces of his low upbringing as he did to hide what he was. Camouflage was second nature to him and that ability extended to more than just the monster inside. He was right though, it wasn’t the alcohol affecting him, but something was different about him. It was refreshing, Lex had to admit.

“If you did that I might get jealous,” Lex smiled up at him. Maybe it was jumping the gun, but a great man wasn’t afraid to take risks. He closed the space between them and found the first button on Davis’ shirt, sliding it open. The room went still with anticipation, and Lex didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he looked back up into Davis’ face.

He didn’t look away, didn’t lower his head and give him the tortured kicked puppy expression that said he didn’t have the right to want this or refuse it, nor did he glance with quiet panic in his face as he did every other time toward his EMS jacket draped over the arm of the sofa with the onyx rosary coiled up in the pocket, the one he’d taken from one of his victims – a nun. Lex had contemplated tying him to the headboard with it, or asking him to wear it and nothing else to teach him that blasphemy and carnal sins were for mortal men to worry about, not gods who possessed the power to destroy.

Davis let him work a second button free, and then the hand at Lex’s jaw gripped the back of his neck, yanking him forward so abruptly Lex slid off the sofa onto his knees on the rug in front of him.

“Yeah?” Davis baited him in that low voice of his, like a challenge in a fight. Lex swallowed, remembering what he’d said a moment ago. _Kneel before Zod_ was all he could think, the command Davis’ father had given Clark through Lex’s body. Davis tugged him closer, between his knees, not hunched in on himself anymore, but straight-backed and powerful, and as Lex nodded up at him a part of him expected Davis to command him to prove it.

He didn’t. His big square palm stroked the back of Lex’s head with surprising gentleness, hot skin against hot skin, and his lips hung open as he stared down into Lex’s eyes. Lex let his elbows rest on the sofa, his hands beside Davis’ hips. He stretched up and Davis closed his eyes, angling his head and letting Lex have his mouth once more.

It wasn’t rough or the least bit sloppy, but it wasn’t gentle either. Davis’ tongue pushed between his lips and Lex curled his fingers into the leather of the sofa, tasting wine and for the first time, arousal. Lex inched closer on his knees for more, intoxicated by the idea in itself. That heat didn’t just come from Davis’ mouth. It came from _him_ wherever they touched, his thighs against Lex’s where he knelt between them, the firm curve of his ass against the back of Lex’s hands. Heat built in his own body and he let one hand trail up to the buttons he’d been working on, unfastening one and then another until Davis’ shirt hung open. He wore a white undershirt beneath, tucked into his pants, but it was thin enough for Lex to trace the muscles of his chest as he ran his hand over it. 

He remembered Clark’s body, a dark-haired Hercules with blue-green eyes, the body a Luthor wasn’t fit to touch, the body Lana had confessed she’d rarely touched. Davis didn’t possess that inviolate perfection and better yet he made a hungry sound as Lex’s fingertips bushed the muscles of his stomach. They tightened and the warm mouth smothering his kissed harder, and then Davis responded in kind, his free hand slipping inside the back of Lex’s waistband and pulling the purple silk of his shirt free in one fistful. Lex went cold even as the throbbing between his legs intensified. He didn’t have the upper hand anymore. He was kneeling on the ground before a figure who wasn’t even a man. His humanity was an illusion. His palm slid down to Davis’ lap, the hardness there felt human enough, and so had the face that had looked up at him as a child when Lex had uncovered his hiding place. _Are you him?_ he’d asked. _Are you Warriror Angel?_ Lex swallowed. He’d been the only one who hadn’t assumed the worst of him from the beginning, the only one who didn’t care his Luthor name.

Lex’s fingers made quick work of his belt, popped open the buttons on his pants, and tugged his zipper down. He half expected Davis to stop him, to see the black and white all of a sudden. But he didn’t. He wasn’t like Clark. He wanted to be saved, not remain unblemished, and in order to be saved you had to sin. 

Davis got an arm around him and pulled him flush against his body, his heart for once beating faster in human excitement and his cock hard against Lex’s stomach in human arousal. He slid forward off the sofa, giving Lex no other direction to go but back until he rested flat against the rug beneath him. Lex blinked up at him, kneeling between his legs now where their positions had shifted. His shirt hung open and so did his dark blue pants. He shrugged out of the shirt and tossed it on top of his jacket on the arm of the sofa. The undershirt followed and he leaned forward, big hands on either side of Lex’s supine body on the rug, dark eyes on his face.

Lex swallowed, unable to take his own eyes away. Davis had stripped off the human trappings, the healer he wanted to be that hid the destroyer so well. Only what lay underneath that intricately woven illusion remained, the muscular body, the smooth white skin that couldn’t be penetrated, the form identical to the conqueror that had taken Lex for a vessel once. The raw power. Davis inched closer, the cold metal of his belt brushing the inside of Lex’s thigh.

“I know Clark hurt you,” he said, his voice gentle and understanding even as his eyes swept over Lex like prey he meant to devour. “I’m not going to.”

Lex’s throat tightened. He wanted to ask what exactly Davis planned on doing with him instead, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have to. Davis grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “turn over.”

Lex’s heart pounded so fast he was fairly sure the rhythm bordered on dangerous. His head swam with panic, and at the same time exhilaration. He’d lost control again, just like with his father and Milton Fine. He let his curiosity and his hunger for power consume him and got in over his head every time. But if he wanted to teach Davis to embrace his power, didn’t he have to surrender to it first? Courage was the mark of a great man, and courage was putting fear inside and taking risks.

He turned, knees on the rug and then his hands. Davis’ hand came under his stomach, fingers spreading out, holding him up. He’d said he wouldn’t hurt him. He’d said he was here because Lex understood him. He didn’t care about his money. Lex closed his eyes and felt Davis’ other hand at his waist, grabbing hold of his pants and pulling them down. 

Cold air and the heat from the fire stung his newly exposed skin, and shame stung the rest of him. He was a Luthor. He didn’t crouch on the ground like this, like some catamite in a classical story. He would have done it for Clark, a voice inside him taunted. He wasn’t a Luthor like his father, he was the helpless boy the other him had locked away in the basement. The one who didn’t want to be hurt anymore.

He was hard, resisting the urge to thrust upward against Davis’ hand. He braced himself instead, waiting, his eyes squeezing tight when he felt the brush of a button against his skin followed by hot, very hard, flesh.

It was like becoming the vessel all over again, his body opening and making room for something that shouldn’t rightly have fit. He saw bright light in his mind as they joined together and he felt Davis’ will drown out his own. Or maybe not. Lex thrust backward and it was Davis who cried out. He’d promised not to hurt him, and even now as the pleasure of Lex squeezing at him overwhelmed him, he seemed determined to keep that promise. Lex’s fingers clawed at the rug. He didn’t want his restraint. He’d survived being hurt before. He wanted to channel the power in him, the raw destruction.

He thrust again, and like anything human Davis’ good intentions fell away in the face of real temptation. He braced a hand on the rug and his hips moved, once and then again. He grunted and then he was thrusting harder, hard enough that he would have pushed Lex forward were it not for the hand against Lex’s stomach.

An incredible sensation built inside him, growing more intense each time Davis pushed into him. Soon enough only the sound of his own rough breathing and the pounding of his blood filled Lex’s ears, his shirt clinging to the sweat on his back. He twisted his upper body around, laying his cheek against the soft wool of the rug underneath him. His mouth hung open and his eyes were shut, one hand on the rug and the other on Lex’ stomach, too far away from where he wanted it. Lex licked his lips, dry from breathing so hard through his mouth. Lex Luthor didn’t beg, but he knew at that moment his face did. 

Davis didn’t open his eyes, but he got the idea. His hand slid down, curling around Lex’s hard length, stroking over him with his warm fingertips even as he bucked into him from behind in a rhythm that hinted at the violence inside. Raw aggression, that was his nature, but something mediated it, something about the man. Human tenderness, something that mattered. Something that made this so much better. Lex’s lower body coiled from the inside and he started to shudder.

His vision went black around the edges, and before he knew it he was lying on his side, drained, one knee drawn up. A hand hovered at his waist, sticky with sweat and something else, and a wall of heat lay against his back. A moment later, he heard Davis catching his breath. A part of him wanted to reach for the hand on his skin, but Lex resisted. Davis hadn’t hurt him as he had promised, but Lex was past needing that. 

He remembered the wine staining the couch. Its effect was what interested him. He would have to increase the amount of red meteor rock next time.


End file.
